Patrick White Poems

My words taste of the flavours of the lives I’ve lived.
I cauterize my wounds on the stars. Runes, cuneiform,
scars, I’ve even found a way to use spiderwebs
like the fridge magnets of an exoteric alphabet.
...

Soft liberation going on underground
as if someone left the gate to my heart open
and the horses are grazing in sidereal pastures
and there’s no turmoil in the wind blowing
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Tears spin off your midnight oilslicks
like sad, romantic novels with sexually suggestive faucets
you can turn on and off, and that’s okay
if you’re out watering your lawn in a drought,
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Alcohol, sex, and this cold spring night in their blood,
the rowdies outside the Crown and Thistle have taken
their chilly elations home. Past midnight, the town quiescent,
the moon, Venus and Jupiter set, the silence of the stars
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That moment of love when life calls to itself
and the summons is answered creatively
and people and things come forth, the stillness
moves and the silence is a song sweeter than words,
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O, an oasis in a tarpit when being alive
is more than enough, and happiness doesn’t scare me
half as much as it used to. It’s only an eyelid,
an opening and closing of doors, a Cepheid variable,
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Train whistle then the rush of surf from its wheels on the track
as if it were hauling an ocean somewhere.
Grafitti from North Carolina on tour, one long art gallery
spray bombed by underground American artists
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In the dark, in a tongue-twister of a whisper
I can hear the silence has added a new voice
stuttering over the sacred syllables of my past
as, even after all these lightyears, it’s still trying
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The lament of the last train whistle
has disappeared into the distance
mournfully looking for its lost child.
October night in the woods
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Seeking the shadows of what you are
you miss who's standing in the light.
Eternity with its tail in its mouth
can't taste much else in life but itself.
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